Lilia told me so much as we wandered, first about the Italian garden just outside the dining-room windows, then across the lawns into the pinewoods. It was so difficult to check her childish confidences, which she poured out as a little creature just finding the use of its tongue will babble as it trots along holding one’s hand. They treated me, all of them, at the Pinewood, except one, of whom more presently, with simple trust; even Nero, the old mastiff, slouched along at our heels with his big tongue out, panting, as if I were an old friend. I must never, even in thought, betray that trust. I must never forget that to aspire would be a breach of that sacred confidence—never, never! On this subject I pray, as the octogenarian said in Dickens’ Haunted Man, “Lord, keep my memory green!”
She talked of her father—well and good.
“Papa has no patience with frivolity,” she said. “He only has sympathy with people who do their duty. That is what every one ought to feel, is it not? Ah! I thought you would say ‘Yes.’ Of course, it is much nicer when you like doing your duty, isn’t it? Those old men who come here and beetle-hunt and botanise, or go poring over the books in the library, not only like what they have to do in life, they love it. I do envy them.”
“But you—you like your life, do you not?” I asked.
Just then we came to a clearing in the wood. A giant pine, lately felled, lay prone among the ferns and mosses. She stopped.
“Let us sit down a moment,” she said; “you take my breath away.”
She seated herself on the trunk, looking like the embodied spirit of the pinewood in her white gown. Nero stood for a few minutes watching me as I sat down beside her, then slouched up and lay down at his mistress’ feet, one eye fixed on me. Evidently this proceeding was new to him. The botanists and gentlemen of the hammer did not care to sit on felled trunks and talk with the daughter of the house.
“I said that,” she went on, “because it was just as if you knew how treasonable my thoughts have been lately. I have actually been wishing to travel, and see the world!”
I asked her what treason there was in that.
“Such an idea, in me, is treason itself!” she said, almost indignantly—“when my father despises the world, and would rather anything should happen than that I should go beyond the Pinewood.”